A full system backup from the SSD via tar now run just under 40MB/s. Vast improvement. Also a large file copy from SSD->raidz went at 78MB/s. I think the earlier transfers may have been partially limited by the IDE drive's read speed.

Speed was never what I was going for with this setup. I want reliable software raid 5, and the built in compression made it a no brainer. Since I'm confident I can come pretty close to keeping a GB network saturated with it, I'm happy.

As of March 4, I have started using LLNL's ZFS as my root filesystem on my laptop. Let's see how far it goes! It looks rock solid so far.

Good luck and let us know about your findings! I'm sure a lot of ppl (myself included) will be interested in your results.

I do have another question tho: I use llnl's zfs-implementation to store the portage related stuff (portage, distfiles and layman) in a zpool. I wrote a small initskript that esentially just loads the spl and zfs modules and calls zfs mount -a. The first step works without any problems but the second fails with the following errors:

Code:

cannot mount 'gentoo/distfiles': No such device or address
cannot mount 'gentoo/overlays': No such device or address
cannot mount 'gentoo/portage': No such device or address

The interesting this is that if i execute zfs mount -a manually as root everything works as expected. It just fails if i call it from the initskript. Do you have any idea why it fails?_________________Raise your beers up high...

As of March 4, I have started using LLNL's ZFS as my root filesystem on my laptop. Let's see how far it goes! It looks rock solid so far.

Good luck and let us know about your findings! I'm sure a lot of ppl (myself included) will be interested in your results.

I do have another question tho: I use llnl's zfs-implementation to store the portage related stuff (portage, distfiles and layman) in a zpool. I wrote a small initskript that esentially just loads the spl and zfs modules and calls zfs mount -a. The first step works without any problems but the second fails with the following errors:

Code:

cannot mount 'gentoo/distfiles': No such device or address
cannot mount 'gentoo/overlays': No such device or address
cannot mount 'gentoo/portage': No such device or address

The interesting this is that if i execute zfs mount -a manually as root everything works as expected. It just fails if i call it from the initskript. Do you have any idea why it fails?

Try putting in some sleep after the module loading. It may be racing with the mount.

Looks like the ebuilds for the LLNL ZFS implementation would be relatively trivial, being standard autoconf / automake / configure based projects, but I thought I'd ask before I went & did 'em if they exist in an overlay somewhere already.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

Looks like the ebuilds for the LLNL ZFS implementation would be relatively trivial, being standard autoconf / automake / configure based projects, but I thought I'd ask before I went & did 'em if they exist in an overlay somewhere already.

I'm working through this new guide: Migrating Bootable Gentoo on ZFS Root. It makes, to me, the rather startling claim that native ZFS will not work right (neither compile nor build) unless you have a non-preemptable kernel (CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y in kernel .config file). For those of you that are experimenting with native ZFS, have you found this to be the case?

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

I'm working through this new guide: Migrating Bootable Gentoo on ZFS Root. It makes, to me, the rather startling claim that native ZFS will not work right (neither compile nor build) unless you have a non-preemptable kernel (CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y in kernel .config file). For those of you that are experimenting with native ZFS, have you found this to be the case?

- John

I use ZFS for the gentoo-related stuff (distfiles, portage-tree and overlays) on my laptop. I have a preemptible kernel and it works. I do get lots of kernel-bug messages in the kernel-related logs but i have found no evidence that it doesn't work. You do have to patch the configure-script tho, as it bails out if you leave it as is and CONFIG_PREEMPT is enabled. At the moment i wouldn't use zfs as root-fs though, as it is known to have performance issues._________________Raise your beers up high...

I left the tests with zfs on linux some time ago, as it got worse and worse for me. Till the point when i wasn't able to mount the fs at all. That was the point for me to give up. Furthermore i still follow the bugreport tracking the CONFIG_PREEMPTIBLE-issues and from what i've seen that this is still not resolved and thus this is still a no-go for desktop systems..._________________Raise your beers up high...

I left the tests with zfs on linux some time ago, as it got worse and worse for me. Till the point when i wasn't able to mount the fs at all. That was the point for me to give up. Furthermore i still follow the bugreport tracking the CONFIG_PREEMPTIBLE-issues and from what i've seen that this is still not resolved and thus this is still a no-go for desktop systems...

I left the tests with zfs on linux some time ago, as it got worse and worse for me. Till the point when i wasn't able to mount the fs at all. That was the point for me to give up. Furthermore i still follow the bugreport tracking the CONFIG_PREEMPTIBLE-issues and from what i've seen that this is still not resolved and thus this is still a no-go for desktop systems...

Linux swap on ZFS zvols works with my latest patches. They are in a pull request at upstream. ZFS is meant to eliminate the need for multiple partitions, traditional raid and logical volume managers. That includes separate partitions for swap.

Currently, Solaris puts swap on a zvol. swap on zvols being perfectly stable in my testing of FreeBSD's 9.0 release, but I believe that they will not recommend it until their 9.1 release. With these patches, Linux swap on zvols is possible. There is currently one lingering issue in it. You can read a description of it in the Gentoo on ZFS for the details.

I have keyworded sys-kernel/spl-0.6.0_rc9 and sys-fs/zfs-0.6.0_rc9 on ~amd64. They include patches for hardened support and deadlock fixes that make swap work. The preemption support patches have been omitted pending some additional changes. The 9999 versions apply no patches.

By the way, we might want to re-evaluate the decision to put this thread in the "Unsupported Software" forum.